"Uh." you hear Skippy vocalize on the other side of the room. Where he was organizing a set of wire cutters and wrenches.
You look over to Slick who pauses in cleaning suspiciously rust colored stains off of a knife. To Senior who was fretting over a singed spot on his hat. To Leader who meets your gaze with a deadpan stare.
The team are certainly a bunch of characters, that's for sure. Kind of gives me Academy City/Railgun vibes, particularly the Scavenger team.
Not really sure when we'll have reason to use Therapy and Pharmaceuticals, but I guess we don't have a skill cap either, so it's whatever.
… And find that you are already on the unrestricted whitelist for his Cube.
Dammit Jörmungandr. It's no fun if you make the victory easy.
Norman seems like a good and caring brother. I like their relationship a lot so far.
He also is clearly quite well informed of how the city works, though his specialty makes that patently obvious. I wonder if he's an inspector, the ones noted to investigate unethical science practices? It would fit his skillset and general impression of being on top of things in terms of information.
As an aside, I wonder what kind of dangers the disaster team is going to bring us? The lab is straightforward enough with its immoral superiors, but perhaps the team has a sponsor who dislikes loose ends?
Professor Tweed
**
You, the contracted, must spend at least 1 action a week on teaching. In exchange, you may make simple illusions for the purpose of teaching aids.
Hm. Not really liking the vibe of Tweed's contracts. If you want to teach, then it's fine, but again, teaching isn't what we're a prodigy of or even talented in. Leviathan is made to do biological science shenanigans with a side of doctoring. It's not something I want to dedicate 20% of the rest of our quest to.
I will note, however, that this means that there are some amazing teachers in the city if we have the money.
...It also means that it would be very easy to kidnap a teacher and force them to teach you things. That's my obligatory Leviathan thought.
You may teach any skill up to your level in the skill.
They gain dice equal to 1+(Teaching skill + specialty)/3
When tutoring one on one, each 2 AP spent may affect all their TAP.
But for the sake of completess I will analyse this:
Base training is 3d3 = 6 exp per TAP. That means we get 6*4 = 24 exp per turn, so we can get Teaching 2 in a turn or two, after which we give +2 dice to students. Getting a 3+3 skill (Science or Medicine in this case) takes 290 exp, and a tutored student learns at 10 exp/TAP (that's 67% quicker, so boy are teachers important this early on) which means that they'll finish tutoring in 8 weeks. That's 16 AP total to contact the god, which is roughly in line with MD Old Bones, if significantly spread out in time.
Now, onto planmaking!
[X] Plan: Preparing the Foundation
-[X] Skill training (Jörmungandr) (Social knowledge (Clandestine Proceedings)) (2 TAP)
-[X] Skill training (Jörmungandr) (Organizational knowledge (AI administrator protocols)) (2 TAP)
-[X] Work: Things seem to be back to "Business as usual". For however usual this business is. Expected pay: 1-3 Decent dots. (2 AP)
-[X] Food: Perhaps you would like to change your diet? Presents diet options. May be modified by your current wealth level. (1 AP)
-[X] Get to know your new employers. How did they come to be mercenaries? How does the mercenary business work? (3 AP)
-[X] Steve - The Builder. Dispute the unfortunate association with (ugh) manual labor, you can see the merit in a god of building grand works. (4 AP)
We should really get out of the timesink of dumpster diving, since we have a modestly reliable income of 0-2 decent dots in disposable income. Spending 20% of that to get 10% more time more than a fair deal. Researching Steve is doing our due diligence, though admittedly I don't think he's going to be our kind of god. After that we should develop our most important contact further, which is useful for the simple reason that they'll be a core part of our foreseeable future.
Training is entirely with Norman/Jörmungandr because training with him is legitimately twice as efficient as anything else, except our already well-trained science skills I suppose. With him we're training at 6d3 = 12 exp/TAP, so 2 TAP will get us level 2 in the new specialty, which I'm assuming will be useful since it comes from a key NPC. After that getting AI Protocols to 3 will be continuously useful since we can see that the AI check can be relevant almost anywhere in the city. We'll need to spend an additional 2 TAP next turn on it though.
In terms of goals I will say that we should wait another week with acquiring a decent lab, for the simple reason that we need a slight money buffer for food and emergencies, so spending all 5 decent dots on a lab now is a bit early. But once we have a lab we can begin with Infinium's contact, and it will also be an avenue to acquire more money via our mercenary team contact. Selling them useful inventions will be a key way to scale up our income in the future.
My personal goal is not to get into cybernetics or augmentations, because that's not really my interest, but rather creating cool and powerful creatures who can do things for us instead. Perhaps something which looks like a Lairon/Aggron or some other cool monster. The aesthetic has a lot of potential, plus it has mechanical benefits in the sense that getting someone else to do the fighting circumvents our permanently subpar combat skill.
I'll likely approval vote
@MrRageQuit's plan later, but for now this is what I think is the best plan available to us.
